A Designer’s Guide to Prototyping Ajax

Let’s face it, there is still a lot of unknown territory in the AJAX world. Perhaps this article on prototyping AJAX will help us to understand where things are headed, and enable us to make better choices with AJAX in general?

Jeffery Zeldman wrote earlier this year in his essay about Web 3.0 that “Wireframing AJAX is a bitch.” And while I can’t deny the statement, I do think there are steps we can take to alleviate the pain. The problem is static XHTML/CSS wireframes are woefully inefficient at the task of communicating and documenting the features available to the new crop of Ajax web sites. Because we’ve been working on a rather intense Ajax project for the last few months, we’ve been developing and refining a number of techniques and guidelines to help our team design for Ajax by moving beyond the traditional forms of functional specs and wireframes to something a bit more appropriate for the dynamic medium—rapid prototyping.

There’s nothing new about them. 37signals’s Getting Real movement is all about sitting down and getting in front of the interface. A prototype is just one of the ways a team can dive right in. For us, prototypes are basically wireframes come to life. A combination of CSS, XHTML and JavaScript, they help me, as an interface designer, communicate effectively the look and feel of a proposed page to a programmer, like Ryan, so he can integrate the interface into a project quickly and efficiently… Source: particletree

[tags]css,ajax,communication,xhtml,prototyping,documenting[/tags]